[Rob Instigator]

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.

His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations--to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth." And: "My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything."

Wilson was born in Methodist Hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child but was cured.

He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the online Paidea University in 1979; the reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

He married the freelance writer Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children; their daughter Luna was killed in 1976. Arlen suffered a stroke and died after long illness in 1999.

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family. On 2 October 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the Subgenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal. As his webpage reported on 10 October, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months.

On the 6th of January, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he was likely to have only between two days and two months left to live. He died five days later, a week before his 75th birthday, at 4:50 AM.


His best-known work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck"; the trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws, concepts Wilson has revisited several times in other writings. Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career.

In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and other works, he examined Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He advocated Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he also wrote about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books containing practical techniques for breaking free of one's "reality tunnels". With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI2LE).

Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort (he was a friend of Loren Coleman), as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he had taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and had written commentary on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

Ironically, considering Wilson long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities", and when asked whether these entities were "real", he answered they were "real enough", although "not as real as the IRS" since they were "easier to get rid of". He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash can lead people to go "quite nuts". Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he says "consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory." More simply, he claims "not to believe anything," since "belief is the death of thought." He has described his approach as "Maybe Logic." Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.

While he had primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he had also used the pen names Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade, and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.

Wilson's writings connect to the madcap satirical fiction of Flann O'Brien in a several ways, including his free use of O'Brien's character De Selby. The views of De Selby, a would-be obscure intellectual, are the subject of long pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Wilson's novels as well as O'Brien's. This is entirely fitting, because O'Brien himself made free use of characters invented by other writers, allegedly because there are already too many fictional characters as is. O'Brien was also known for pulling the reader's leg by concocting elaborate conspiracy theories, and for publishing under several pen names.

[tesla69]

I saw him speak live a couple times and he loved this anagram

George Herbert Walker Bush = Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog

On time I in the early 90's I went to see him at the Booksmith on Haight St. My bus was slow and I got there about 20 mins late. He was taking questions and so I put up my hand and he called on me. I forget what I asked him, but the whole room busted out laughing and he growled at me, What, have you been asleep? I just spent the last half hour talking about that! Another time he spoke with Peter Lambord Wilson (no relation) and PLW mentioned that RAW would be on his WBAI radio show that night. This was the late 80's and there was no internet then and little way to find out about things, so I went up to PLW and asked him what time his radio show was on. The guy sneered at me like I was doing something wrong "Midnite". So I did tape a portion of that show where they talk about Black masons. I think they just thought it was funny to say that. Black masons.

IN retrospect, he was a very informative, interesting speaker. I never bother with his illuminati books because honestly, how much fictionalized pseduoconspiracy do I need in my life? The sex drugs and magic book was must reading in the 80's but it actually seems kind of light weight now (i.e, after last years Peter Levenda trilogy of the Occult History of America). I also think he was too involved with the church of the subgenius, which I think is a bunch of nonsense.

All the good ones are leaving us quickly. Burroughs, Leary, Lilly, McKenna, Ginsberg...

[Hip Priest]

I just thought that those of you with an interest in the man might like to read this from today's Daily Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph write the best obituaries:

Robert Anton Wilson

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 13/01/2007

Robert Anton Wilson, who died on Thursday aged 74, was co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy and an influential gadfly of the counterculture.

Scarcely any alternative school of thought popularised since the 1960s escaped his attention as a promoter (or debunker, and often both) of conspiracy theories, theology, philosophy, psychology, occultism, chaos theory, neurolinguistic programming and quantum mechanics, or in his stints as an essayist, lecturer, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, punk musician, associate editor of Playboy and write-in candidate for governor of California, representing the Guns and Dope party – which also advocated equal rights for ostriches.

He justified the last of these roles by asking: "Why should I remain the only nutcase in Califonia who ain't running?" But it was a natural development of his career as an agent provocateur against convention.

He was American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal, but despite his apparent frivolity – his written work was relentlessly jokey – Wilson was an extremely influential figure, partly because his situationist anarchism was combined with a peculiarly American combination of showmanship, autodidacticism and productivity.

Wilson was also the inspiration for the founding of two "religions": Discordianism and the Church of the Subgenius, whose high priest Ivor Stang called him "the Carl Sagan of religion, the Jerry Falwell of quantum physics and the Arnold Schwarzenegger of feminism".

Wilson's best-known publications were the Illuminatus! books written with Robert Shea, a gleeful conglomeration, and send-up, of almost every conspiracy theory ever formulated, and the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy, a shaggy-dog science fiction series inspired by quantum theory. Other books ranged from The Sex Magicians (1973) to Neuropolitics (with Timothy Leary and George Koopman, 1978, revised 1988), Quantum Psychology (1990) and Chaos and Beyond (1994).

Nor was Leary the only cult name with which he was associated: Wilson's work nodded to or drew heavily from Jung, Vico, Nietzsche, Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, William Reich, William S Burroughs, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, Philip K Dick, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Fort and most of the other usual suspects.

Robert Anton Wilson was born on January 18 1932 in Brooklyn, New York City, and spent his early years in a poor Irish-Catholic section of Flatbush. He suffered from a serious attack of polio when he was four, but was "cured" by the Sister Kenny method, which the medical establishment regarded as quackery.

Robert was initially educated by nuns, whom he remembered as stern and unforgiving, and who told him when he was seven that there was no Father Christmas. "I kept waiting for them to admit there's no God," he said. "They never did."

He was left with a profound scepticism about all areas of faith, and a commensurate regard for experimental research. The family had moved to Gerritsen Beach, a fishing village on Brooklyn's south-eastern coast, and at Brooklyn Technical High School, where he was preparing for a career in electrical engineering, he encountered the work of Alfred Korzbyski, whose book Science and Sanity convinced him that few questions had yes or no answers. Prompted by this theory, he began to read widely (Joyce and Ezra Pound became particular passions) and to formulate a view of the world which he later dubbed "Maybe Logic".

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he engaged with avant-garde notions, drugs and mysticism, and through his wife Arlen became friendly with Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist and advocate of LSD. Albert Hofman, the inventor of LSD, was also a longstanding friend.

By the mid-1960s he was working as an editor at Playboy alongside Shea, and they began to write Illuminatus! after asking themselves "What if every conspiracy theory was true?" Its freewheeling combination of jokes, thriller and preposterous theories was wildly popular, particularly with rock musicians and writers associated with the hippy movement; recently, some critics have argued for it as an inspiration for The Da Vinci Code.

Wilson then published incessantly and on every conceivable subject, arguing that the brain was a filtering system which disguised the true nature of existence: he wrote a screenplay called Reality Is What You Can Get Away With.

Among his many other publications were Sex and Drugs (1973); Cosmic Trigger (1977, followed by two sequels); Prometheus Rising (1983); Coincidance (1988); Everything is Under Control (1998); TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution (2002) and an article entitled Whoever Controls Princess Diana, Controls the World.

He lived for a while in Ireland, then moved to Capitola, California. In latter years he suffered from post-polio syndrome and was a vigorous proponent of the medical use of marijuana. He moved into a hospice some months ago; an appeal on the internet for funds for his medical fees brought in $68,000 from admirers in a matter of days.

He married, in 1958, Arlen Riley, a former scriptwriter for Orson Welles. She predeceased him in 1999. They had four children; after his daughter Patricia was murdered during a robbery in 1976 when she was 15, he had her brain put into cryonic suspension.

[Rob Instigator]

thank you hip priest